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That's a great article, and balancing free speech with censorship is a difficult problem. But it becomes a constant headache only on centralized platforms, where no amount of resources can realistically monitor and filter all content. This scales in complexity as the platform grows, which is the goal of any centralized service. And if the business model depends on advertising, it becomes even messier and crucial to its existence.

P2P services OTOH work on a decentralized and pull model. Users share and only subscribe to the content they're interested in. Censorship is distributed, and it's a problem for people who don't wish to see specific content. It's the way the internet works, and the existing approach of removing sensitive content applies to P2P services as well. Since there are no advertisers to appease, it's not an existential problem.

You didn't answer the question.

The question was, to wit, >How do you keep CP off it?

Your answer was: >I don't, just don't look at the CP.

The problem really in question here is:

You've just created a new distribution method for this type of thing and punted the consequences for someone else to deal with.

(Which is totally cool imo, but newsflash, expect to be the subject of a hit piece some time in the forseeable future. It shouldn't take long; either for actual criminals to set up on it, or for LE to do it to "snare unsophisticated actors").

Welcome to the Internet, where we can't have/make nice things anymore.

How do we deal with objectionable content already on the internet? It gets taken down by law enforcement of some country that finds it objectionable, and we handle the case in courts.

A new protocol that makes this content more accessible isn't an issue with the protocol, but with society and how we decide to deal with it. If CP is found to be served by nginx over HTTP, is that a problem with nginx or HTTP?

If anything, centralized services only make the problem more difficult to address, since they're expected to serve the demands of governments, companies and law enforcement agencies worldwide, while somehow being the arbiter of free speech. Those are impossible goals to reach, and go against the original design of the internet.

This discussion is as old as P2P protocols. I'm sure that if Nostr became a popular way to share copyrighted content, governments would try to fight it, just as they've done before. But at the same time, censorship is not something a protocol should care about, and just like BitTorrent thrives today, with enough interest, Nostr would also find a way to persist.

In many European jurisdictions, you are criminally liable for anything that makes it onto your systems, regardless of how it got there.

So, the OP has just given people a whole new way of making themselves liable for illegal content, just by running the P2P software in question.

In most cases, the police aren't interested in hauling a service provider into jail, they want to haul in the person who put that content there. But this does make a nice little lever that the police can use against any service provider.

Nostr lets you specify who and what you subscribe to, so unless you subscribe to everything and everyone this isn't really a problem. You can also subscribe to followers' followers and expand that way.

Unlike what OP says Nostr relays are not dumb, they can have their own policies and to me they look like a better version of Mastodon servers. They can have identities, "themes" and policies as they wish. On Nostr it's totally fine for one relay to only allow certain kinds of content and block everything else. Users can just connect to multiple relays if they want to read/write about different things.

What bugs me about it is their naivety to solved technical problems. For instance, they answer the question of “why this hasn’t been done?” with:

> I don't know, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that people making social networks are either companies wanting to make money or P2P activists who want to make a thing completely without servers.

Except it has been done. In fact, that’s literally what KaZaA was with its “superpeers”. And what they realized was that by making a semi-decentralized system, they just introduced the weaknesses of both systems (slow downloads via peer-latency and network limits + easy censorship by killing relays/nodes). In addition, this is exactly how IRC works, despite the fact that it’s mostly used with a few nodes these days.

I’m not against semi-decentralized systems. They’re great and help deal with some scalability problems; but they don’t solve for the number one issue most people moving to decentralized are seeking (anonymity, privacy and free speech), so it’s not fair to compare it to platforms/protocols that do offer those features.

I don't know about KaZaA but I remember it was very popular for a time, so it might have done some things right? What was its fate? Was it censored to death?

And I disagree very much that IRC is "semi-decentralized". IRC is completely centralized, it is just chat rooms on a server. You have to register on each server and each server has full control over its rooms and users.

I'm sure all the script kiddies who loved to take over channels in netsplits are gonna be disappointed that they never actually did that now.

More seriously, this is the second time I've seen someone on here characterize IRC in this (very wrong) way in the last day. Where is this coming from?

IRC networks are made up of servers that relay (hence Internet Relay Chat) with each other. You connect to one server and you can communicate both with people local to that server and people on other servers that are part of the same network (including ones that server is not directly connected to). Channels prefixed with # are shared across all servers in the network, while channels starting with & are local to that server (though rarely used).

Part of it is that for users IRC definitely presents as centralised. You don't usually connect to a specific server, but rather a network that did some load balancing in the background. Like you typically connect to irc.efnet.org and not one of the sixty servers specifically.

I think you may be confused because you decided to rely on this loose concept of "semi-decentralization". IRC providers may use multiple servers, but that doesn't mean decentralization. They are closed networks, not very different from any sufficiently big internet business that runs multiple servers behind a load-balancer.

See https://drewdevault.com/2021/07/03/How-does-IRC-federate.htm...

KaZaA was also a big spyware.

Scale is hard, but for small-to-medium sized clusters, you can use your own node, or a friends'. Now you have your own copy of the data, and control over latency. The key insight with nostr is the multi-master architecture.

They may be young and unaware of "solved technical problems," but they are full of energy, and every generation has to relearn the same things.

But as for peer latency issues or easy censorship by killing nodes, I don't see it. Nostr has fan-out, but not as much as RSS does and I don't expect superrelays.

I also don't follow you on the issue of anonymity or privacy. The guy who started it fiatjaf is anonymous. We don't know who he is. And you can be too. Just make up a key, create and sign an event, and push it into whatever relay takes your fancy... through Tor if that's your thing.

Relays can censor as much as they want, since they're only stewrding a small part of the network, likely replicated elsewhere. As to building in ways to curate/moderate content in a distributed way, there are lots of ideas out there as to how that might happen. Here's an issue I opened just the other day: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/75

Yes this is the crux of any social media application. I don't know if there will ever be a perfect solution.

I like that nostr abstracts this problem away from the relays. Relays only focus on storing data and handling subscriptions. They can choose to censor and/or curate content if need be, but it's not their concern.

It's up to the client to come up with a solution, and that client can be a platform or a protocol of its own.

edit it also feels really great to work on that problem from the application layer. I can come up with a solution that isn't confined to the parent protocol.

I'd like such a protocol to be designed so servers, relays, etc. are unable to censor content at the protocol level (if someone creates it, it is available) and the filtering is done on the client side.

Commonly filtered things (account block lists, post flag lists, filter rules, etc.) could be shared via the same system — indeed there could even be competing versions and everyone could follow their preferred filter source.

Users would also likely run statistical and machine learning based spam and content filters locally (perhaps on a personal relay/server of some sort, or an account on a shared one) configured to their preferences.

I would expect the infrastructure running such a network to be in the same position as Signal, who do not know the content of messages and can't censor them, leaving individual clients to figure out blocking etc. (albeit the client side options as well as ways to share configurations etc. would need to be much more advanced for a social network or similar than for a messaing app).

Just mute them. Or just follow who you follow with no suggestions of other people. Or relays can have a censorship policy based on the law or community standards or anything else they want... and the people will use whatever relays work for them (typically multiple relays to follow multiple crowds). Some people want censorship, some don't, the protocol is totally agnostic on this point.

I noticed you haven't shared your email address in your profile. Surely if muting is sufficient you would accept that it's a risk-free action?

> r because there are some pretty solid laws about things that various governments require people to filter out?

There are solid laws protecting copyright everywhere yet it is stilm trivially easy to find copyrighted content available for free online. Laws dont mean anything unless they are or can be enforced.